Odd freezing in syock gallery app only

So Friday when I opened the gallery app to view some recent photos I noticed the screen/app would freeze after I had opened my "camera" folder and swiped through approx 3 pics. It would freeze, somtimes I would get the "gallery not responding" popup and have an option to force close it or wait. Somtimes I could hit the home button and get to the homescreen within a minute or so. This is on a Galaxy Note 2 that I had since december of 2012 problem free to date. The "video" folder was doing the same thing but only froze when trying to play the vids, I had no problem swiping through the list. In a bit of a rush to get back to normal I used my backup program to back everything up and I did a factory reset. After reinstalling my backup app it could not find the backups on my SD card and I was forced to spend hours getting my phone back to the way it was previously....and then....the gallery "camera" folder was STILL freezing....So, the only thing I could find to work was to delete all of my pics and vids. I had recently taken about 10 pics or so and everything seems normal again! Can anyone enlighten me on what is/was happening? Is my SD card currupted? All signs point at the SD, but why problem free after pic/vid deletions?
Things to note: All pics and vids in topic were taken with my Note 2, Never had a problem with the phone in 6 months, No other app freezes or stalls, Majority of pics couldnt be viewed (error message in place of pic) when phone was attached to pc and even the windows viewer seemed to lag when trying to scroll through pics. Deleting all pics and vids on phone fixed problem (so far)......! ? ! ?

Unfortunately that's a software glitch in touchwiz. I ran into the exact same issue, so I went into play and found this gallery replacement app called quickpic and haven't had any issues since. You should look into it

Thank you for the input! I originally thought this as well untill I hooked the phone to my pc and the windows image viewer was acting wierd/stalling as well as not showing all the pics that were on the SD card (error screen when selecting certain pics), wich is what leads me to think the SD is bad......

Edit: OK, proved the SD card was bad. I removed it, installed in my SD reader and put it in my laptop and let Windows attempt to repair it. It did find some bad sectors and claimed to have repaired them but unfortunately the card still shows signs of problems. My first sign there was still a problem was when in my camera app, I try to select the SD card as the storge place for my pics but immediately after taking a pic it claims there is a problem with the external SD card and is switching storage to phone.....SO, off to get a new SD card!

Just for the sake of somone possibly doing a search on this in the future: It was deffinately the SD card. I purchased a new one and everything is working perfectly once again and storing to the SD properly. I was able to extract about 98-99% of what was on the old card using my card reader. Not sure if it matters but my old card was a PNY class 4 and my new card is a Sandisk class 10. I decided to register the new card incase it fails in 6 months like the last card....kind of rediculous (but appearently quite common)!

Definitely good that you were able to get to the bottom of it. There are definitely a few known glitches with Samsung's gallery app, so just always remember that quicpic gallery replacement app. It's definitely a winner, and visually customizable aswell. When I ran into that issue with my note 2 and S3, it wasn't a card issue

Yesterday July 30, 2013 I started having the same problem. Using My Files App I went into /storage/extsdcard/DCMI/Camera, and found some files with weird symbols. I suppose this is the cause of trouble. At some point some data was corrupted and now the app is unable to read it. I am trying to delete the files but it does not allowed me to delete them.

I tried another apps as suggested but they neither can read the pictures. Something definitely corrupted the SDCARD.